2008:03:14
Art
"Tolerance Test" - Robert Link, 2008. Electronic file, created in Adobe Illustrator, modified for web with Adobe Photoshop.
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2008:02:12
Toward A Philosophy of Language
A recent discussion helped clarify some of the foundational observations on which I rest much of my thinking about language.
Words don't mean, people do.
People make noises.
People hear noises they and other people make.
People respond to what they hear.
People gesture.
People see gestures they and other people make.
People respond to what they see.
People make marks.
People see marks they and other people make.
People respond to what they see.
"Language" is, generally, a reified subset of the noise, gestures, and marks people see and hear.
Discussion of "language" which strays too far from the basic observations is suspect.
It is this last piece that sets me apart from the mainstream, for there is nothing controversial about the rest (outside of those circles which have reified the domain so completely that they cannot undo their construction.) Keeping the above in mind means constantly taking conversations about language with a grain of salt, at lest to the extent that such languages rely on traditional distinctions and nomenclature which all presupposes acceptance of the reified domain.
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2007:10:26
Sun / Decrease
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The text notwithstanding, nor the received order of the hexagrams, the first thing to note about Sun is that while the upper trigram is still the purple mountain's majesty the lower has transformed from that of the raging abyss, which manifests at the foot of a mountain as an abundant spring, into the joyous lake. This is an easy extrapolation, one repeated 8 times throughout the cycle of cycles we see as we build and explore the hexagrams in what I would today call construction order or order of building light. Perhaps there was reason to submerge the cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels aspect of watching the hexagram grow from all yin to all yang, but when taking them in this order it is hard to miss. So today I digress and look for a moment at the trigrams each in turn.
K'un, Mother, all yin, Earth, receiving and nurturing all things (good and bad, if it needs repeating here.) This is binary zero.
Chen, youngest son, first light, "the arousing thunder", energy springing up from the earth. This is binary one.
K'an, the middle son, the gorge or abyss or ravine. In Meng/Youthful Folly it becomes an abundant spring. There is pressure and speed and even danger here, but a more manifest power than the potential of his younger brother. This is binary two.
Tui, the youngest daughter, joyous, the marsh or lake. Note that the six mixed trigrams take their gender from the odd line rather than the predominating lines. Combining the potential and shock of first light with the manifestation of the abyss we get a joyous lake. This is binary three.
Ken, the mountain, boundary, stillness, the oldest son. Where Chen is fleeting and evanescent but scintillating in its energy, Ken is the stately older brother, slow, placid, solid. The boundaries of the kingdom are set in nature by the existence of impassable mountain ranges, and Ken gives us that kind of manifest delineation, telling us, and keeping us, where we are. This is binary four.
Li, radiance, fire, brightness, the visual opposite or complement of her brother, K'an, she is a dark line of potential in the middle of two light lines of manifestation. This is binary five.
Sun, Wood and wind, the eldest daughter, with her receptive yin submerged beneath two ascendant lines of manifestation. This is binary six.
Ch'ien, Father, all male, all light, all manifest, no receptivity, all convex, no concave, making making making, never taking. This is binary seven, and completes the move from all dark to all light.
We will travel that cycle eight times, and each time we travel it we will visit it for eight sub-cycles. Hexagrams zero through seven have K'un as their top trigram, public face, conscious theme, outer hook, and in turn we contemplate this upper, outer, conscious state with each of the others in turn as the inner reality, then we do the same with Chen, the arousing as the outer, each of the others in turn as the inner. And so we go through the cycles within the cycles, the wheels within the wheels, and we attune ourselves to the ebb and flow of the light and the dark, knowing that neither is good or evil of itself but that our capacity to work for the good or suffer evil is predicated largely on our ability to discern the subtle differences between shades of grey.
That might be the most compelling view of the hexagrams. Where the peasant seeks a simple yes or no answer, a vision of the future as holding good or ill, evidenced by a simple single yin or yang, the seeker strives to encompass the difference between old yin, new yin, new yang and old yang, shown by two lines. But even this state of sagacity, encompassing twice as many distinctions as the prior level of development, is not enough, and so we add one more line, and now have eight gradations from absolute no to absolute yes and rather than mere flip-flopping alternation we are drawn to think of progression and cycle.
Did the ancients first try to encompass a 4 bit moral logic, four lines yielding 16 subtle shades of yes/no/maybe/maybe-not? Or did they instantly jump to the 6 bits of the hexagram by positing outer and inner and observing the cycles within the cycles? We know that the received texts offer analysis of so-called nuclear trigrams within hexagrams, so it is not far-fetched to think that at one point the ancients sought directly to distinguish 64 points from all dark to all light. But the easier way to achieve that goal is to observe them as the two chunks of outer and inner, upper and lower. Still, if we accept that challenge, of learning to discern the hexagrams as 8 cycles of 8, do we view it as simply a mnemonic to hold us steady as we learn to discern and distinguish the various arrays of energy more directly?
Back to Decrease. I've received this many times, and have always been a little off-put by the unevenness of the reading. I tend to hold to the parts that seem most essential, the reversals and reframes. Decrease is not always bad, the breath must go out before the next inhale can begin. But the Wilhelm/Baynes also says:
This is out and out decrease. If the foundations of a building are decreased in strength and the upper walls are strengthened, the whole structure loses its stability.
Frankly, that doesn't fit for me in the conversion of the inner trigram from spring to lake. The only decrease I see is one of pressure, from a gushing to an easier state of simply being, with the flow hidden from the casual eye. The Wilhelm/Baynes, contradicting itself, also says of this hexagram:
The lake at the foot of the mountain evaporates. In this way it decreases to the benefit of the mountain, which is enriched by its moisture...By this decrease of the lower powers of the psyche, the higher aspects of the soul are enriched.
Sympathetic as I am to that observation, it conflicts with the earlier metaphor about foundations, and it doesn't really flow from the image---evaporation isn't the first thing one thinks of when one thinks of lakes. And the moisture on the mountain probably comes less from such evaporation than from the same rains that feed the lake; the lake is the beneficiary of water that the mountain could not hold.
So I'm left at odds with the received text. Such is the arrogance of the self-taught, about which we read in other hexagrams. For now I close with the simple teaching device, that we are waltzing through the cycle of eight from K'un to Ch'ien, repeating each eight times, holding the outer constant while the inner cycles. Perhaps, on reaching 63, that is how I will cycle back down, holding the inner solid and letting the outer whirl through the cycles.
The mountain sets the boundaries, the lake brings joy. Soon it will change.
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2007:10:13
Loving Islam
Original here:
This must be our stance, our language, our work. We must shun the language proffered by Horowitz. We must not give further circulation to his hateful, hate provoking phraseology, we need not repeat the words or otherwise do his advertising and reinforcement for him. It is enough that we choose the week of October 22 as our week of Loving Islam. If this concept isn't self-evident then this wiki is a good place to discuss it further. The Horowitz action is an attempt to pick a fight. If we fight, he and his win.
We must instead love.
We first must each love our God our way. We must each love our faith, our people, ourselves. Then we must love our neighbors as ourselves, however that rule might be expressed in our particular faith. And then, during the week of the Horowitz action, we must visibly, publicly, lovingly love Islam and our Muslim brothers and sisters. We must not fight fire with fire; water works so much better. We must starve this fire of fuel and oxygen and even heat if possible. By loving Islam.
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2007:10:03
Meng / Youthful Folly
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From the Wilhelm/Baynes:
...If mistrustful or unintelligent questioning is kept up, it serves only to annoy the teacher...and the chun tzu fosters character by thoroughness in all acts...the spring escapes stagnation by flowing on and filling up all the hollow places in its path...confusion with subsequent enlightenment...
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers....danger and standstill, this is folly...To strengthen what is right in a fool is a holy task...
13 in the Mawangdui..."beneficial to determine...the Karcher is so removed from the European assumptions, no hint of the first Tarot in its reading...arguably closer to Rumi's "Wean yourself,"
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed
Listen to the answer
There is no "other world."
I only know what I have experienced.
You must be hallucinating
Balkin almost makes it "out of the mouths of babes", but continues with "The wisdom that lies beneath the surface and can be brought out through education and proper training" and "Remember that your goal is to learn, not show off what you already know."
Then Professor Balkin sidetracks into theorizing about whether the references to importuning the oracle should be taken literally, "...there is no evidence that Meng is more likely to appear through random selection than is any other hexagram." I eschew the coins in no small part because there is much less of the random in the stalks, much more of the meditative, arbitrary, unconscious. A skilled diviner could indeed manipulate the stalks with relative ease, like forcing a card in a magic trick, and cause any given result. This is not that case with the coins. The possibility of such forcing, however, is part of what makes the stalk technique superior, not because it can be done, but because of the delicacy of approach required to avoid doing it, the intentional putting into abeyance one's ability to hear what one wishes to hear, similar to the 18 iterations of the cycle of not knowing (will the first half bundle yield big or little?) to knowing (given the results of the first bundle, the second bundle results serve as a check of our work and hold no mystery.) Balancing these states of certainty and uncertainty, willfulness and acceptance, such balancing is itself valuable, and cannot be acquired through flipping coins.
The reference to importuning, also, need not come on multiple consultations; it serves at an initial consultation to exhort the supplicant to take heed of the first casting, for it is better to meditate on the hexagram that comes up than to keep fishing for one that makes easy sense to us. If the first answer doesn't make sense supplementing it with more will often only cloud the issue. Recall, however, that there is at least one hexagram which, in essence says, "Ask again." Balance and timing in all things. Soon it will change.
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2007:09:11
Open Thread
Use the comments to say what you like. Click "writebacks", below, then the "Add comment" button. Name and email are required, as is the little reading test, all to save us from spam. Looking forward to it!
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conTExT (experimental poem)
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2007:07:19
Filters: Intentional, Accidental, Meta
I had quite unintentionally forsaken Language Log, mostly because I had come to rely over much on my rss reader and last time I checked Language Log's feed didn't play nice therein. Which, in turn, has me thinking about filtering effects of infrastructure choices on cognition. Enough for now to repeat the old "What you pay attention to determines what you miss", with the added thought that the technology you indulge will determine what you can, and thus do, pay attention to.
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Why So Quiet?
I have been guilty of letting my political pursuits commandeer the majority of my time, and can't remember the last time I made a substantive addition to this site. Partly that's because I've been lazy, and the occasional post which would have arguably fit here ended up at Oblios Cap.
I got to thinking maybe I should try to find some feeds which could prompt more for this blog. So I tried this google search. Let me ask: When was the last time you had a search return only 55 results?
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2007:06:21
The Corners of the Mouth
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Outside boundaries, thunder within. Stoic and calm in one's presentation to the world, but electrified power in one's inner world, driving one to ever new achievement.
Like the previous hexagram, the pattern here begs to be interpreted as a whole rather than merely as the sum of the two trigrams, but such interpretations are suspect despite being the focus of the received text. Perhaps it is a difference between a particulate representation of language such as English versus a pictographic representation of language such as Chinese. I am increasingly inclined to think the hexagram names started life as mnemonics and only accreted their interpretive meanings after students "lost quotes" on the process. But I have similar views about mnemonics in Western tradition too, and the magic that makes something memorable can seem more important than that which was to be remembered. We are good at losing track of the levels at which we intended to operate.
If we wish to know what anyone is like, we have only to observe on whom he bestows his care and what sides of his own nature he cultivates and nourishes...tranquility keeps the words that come out of the mouth from exceeding proper measure, and keeps the food that goes into the mouth from exceeding its proper measure.
Terribly unimpressed by this hexagram as treated. The Willhelm/Baynes reading is barely a page of text, this despite the attractive memorability of the hexagram pattern. Ah, but the particulate, the elemental, the inner/outer of the trigrams. Today we see the value of starting with basics. Truly learn the trigrams and any reading is simple in terms of inner and outer.
This is also a good time to look at the "nuclear" trigrams, that is, the trigrams formed by lines 2-4 and 3-5. In this case they are both K'un, and so we get a "nuclear hexagram" of K'un as well. Despite my preference for the elementalistic analysis, I don't much like this term, "nuclear". Consider, then, that each hexagram is a manifest public trigram layered on top of a manifest private trigram, but in the building of the hexagram from the bottom up we pass through the inner or transitory trigrams traditionally called "nuclear". What really tickles me about this description is it seems to call for a new axis of movement for which I lack a word. Maybe it's because so much of the discussion is of binary events, inner outer, static or changing. But this view sees a total of four trigrams created as the six lines are determined, lines 1-3 being the base, the foundation, the most enduring and tangible core related to the essential self of the person for whom the casting is done. Lines 2-4 represent a transitional trigram, lower and thus older, closer to the source, the root of things than what follows, but removed from the "inner" trigram of lines 1-3. One could even take a four line reading and derive a hexagram from it using these two trigrams. But the addition of the fifth line permits analysis of a third trigram of lines 3-5, and allows of two more hexagrams, one consisting of the initial trigram under that of lines 3-5, another consisting of the trigram of lines 2-4 under that of lines 3-5. The first of these could be considered more strongly rooted in nature, being built on the first three lines, but the interaction of trigrams in the second could be considered in some ways more robust as there is more overlap of lines. Add the sixth line and now there are four trigrams from which to build no fewer than six trigram pairs, with the traditional pair from which we determine "the" hexagram arguably viewed as where the energy enters and departs into the world of the supplicant and the other five allowing for a sense of progression from entry to exit even where there are no changing lines. This, then, is the aspect which seems to call for a third dimension, a third distinction, something like the inner/outer and changing/static distinctions which is both and neither.
I. Space, my Lord, is height and breadth indefinitely prolonged.
STRANGER. Exactly: you see you do not even know what Space is. You think it is of Two Dimensions only; but I have come to announce to you a Third --- height, breadth, and length.
I. Your Lordship is pleased to be merry. We also speak of length and height, or breadth and thickness, thus denoting Two Dimensions by four names.
STRANGER. But I mean not only three names, but Three Dimensions.
I. Would your Lordship indicate or explain to me in what direction is the Third Dimension, unknown to me?
STRANGER. I came from it. It is up above and down below.
I. My Lord means seemingly that it is Northward and Southward.
STRANGER. I mean nothing of the kind. I mean a direction in which you cannot look, because you have no eye in your side.
(excerpted from E.A. Abbott's "Flatland")
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Tags: I Ching